When does something that’s “new” stop being “new”?
This question nagged me recently as I stood in line for an hour at the TKTS booth in Times Square hoping to get discounted tickets for Exit the King. Opposite me, along dozens of other huge billboards and flashing lights, was a billboard advertising Wicked as a “new” musical, even though it’s almost six years old. Now, anyone who knows me well knows that I hate waiting, and I also hate TKTS – I resent that a “cheap” Broadway ticket is $60, when I saw the best theater that the West End had to offer for about $10-20 as a grad student in London. So I was inclined to be angry at something. And I was angry at the idea that Wicked is a “new” musical, and (since clearly my anger needed more targets) at the concept of “newness” more generally.
Sure, it’s newer than Phantom of the Opera, but I’d imagine “new” to mean that it came out this year. Granted, a lot of this is just hoopla, kind of like how every pizza store in the city claims to be The Best Famous Pizza in New York!!! (though even then, I’m not sure who the hoopla’s meant to work on. Best Famous Pizza signs are for tourists, but my experience has been that the Broadway-going tourists want to see what they know – Phantom, Les Mis, or a musical adaptation of Teen Wolf (hey, I’m sure it’s coming) – not something too “new”). But it also raised the question at the top of this post.
I think of this too given my pet peeve regarding the term “new media”: at what point are we finally going to stop calling it “new”? Sometimes, that phrase ages its user something fierce, as when computers are “new media,” even though I’m bald and grew up using them, so they can’t be that new. Calling a whole group of media “new” seems silly, since surely there will come a point when (a) “new media” aren’t new, and when (b) there are “newer” media that we need to talk about as new, without people thinking we’re talking about Commodore 64s.
Of course, there’s the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) in Amsterdam that was made in the 15th Century as the exaggerated example here. Obviously, there were older churches, but keeping that placeholder of “new” is patently absurd there.
What annoys me about the term, then, is partly that it’s lazy. Rather than actually trying to come up with a term that accurately classifies something or a group of somethings, calling it “new” is a cop out, and it just dooms people in the future to account for our mistakes retroactively. If “new media” right now is a mix of computers, the Internet, iPhones, DVRs, Slingboxes, HDTV, etc., why don’t we just work out terms that describe what these have in common … or give up and realize that there are better ways to classify such media with already-existent media.
The other source of my annoyance with the term, though, is that it subtly convinces us to think that the new is somehow more important. And so a great deal of study of media is by necessity of the “new.” When I was in Malawi, as I’ve posted on, I was really struck by how much music that gets listened to, and how many movies that get watched, are decisively not new. But as Derek Kompare points out in his brilliant book Rerun Nation, much television that Americans watch is now new either. And as my wife joked a couple of weeks back while I was watching a hockey game, most sports stadiums in the country, save for playing Lady Gaga, sound as though they’re stuck in the eighties with all the Queen, Randy Bachman, Billy Joel, and so forth playing all the time. Yet when we come to study media, so many of us run like magnets to the “new.” I’m often one of them, since I find very interesting things in recent developments, so I’m not so much counseling the field to all spend way more time with Stripes, Facts of Life, and REO Speedwagon as I am complaining that we can become obsessed with what seems new at the expense of what’s always been around. I’d like to see Wicked, after all, but it ain’t new, so why do we need to call it new?
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new media, theater
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